Brightly coloured Bougainvilleas in all their glory are a typical winter landscape feature in Jamaica. This palette of colour creates the perfect invitation to Barrington Watson's art studio in Orange Park Jamaica. Here, Barry (left) reacquaints with John Searchwell, Retired Educator, at the beginning of the inaugural Barrington Watson Retrospective Tour on February 4, 2012, organized by the Jamaica Cultural Enterprise in conjunction with the National Gallery of Jamaica. The tour included a visit to the artist's home in St. Thomas. John was accompanied by friends and family, including his daughter Marnie visiting with us from the U.K. Photo by Marnie Searchwell Kindred

Snow birds travel south in winter. So do our fellow Jamaicans living in northern climes. They get home sick in winter so they come for a couple weeks to escape the bleak winters, to warm the cheeks and to bring cheer to their families. Foreigners comb the travelogues for a warm escape. Jamaica beckons.

Mike Jarrett Photo

The verandah at Neita’s Nest is a perfect vantage point for spotting unusual birds flitting through our trees; some blue, some red throated, some speckled, and I realize that they are not our tropical birds. They are just visiting with us to keep warm too. It is always exciting to see the visiting birds while they commune and share the same space with our local ones; parakeets, humming birds, nightingales, hopping dicks, woodpeckers, doves and hawks.

Another feature of these early months of the year is that we don’t get much rain, if any. Some say this is our autumn. The leaves yellow and fall. The grasses brown, and intermittently, bush fires can be spotted on the dry mountains.

One would think that this is not a good time to visit Jamaica. Quite the contrary! Apart from the occasional cold fronts, which by the way I just love, we do have some really cool breezes blowing, keeping our tropical temperatures down to the mid 70s and low 80s. We have many a cloudless sky, and the few clouds are often wafted away by the breezes. Against the stark contrast of the brown grass and charred mountains surrounding Kingston, I am enthralled, year after year by the beauty of our bougainvilleas and poui. They are at their ever best at this time of the year.

At Neita’s Nest we have the bougainvilleas in fiery orange, understandably named Kenyan Sunset, the pink and white called Surprise Bougainvillea, and the fuchsia named The Lady B, for the wife of our first Prime Minsiter, Sir Alexander Bustamante. Our Poui is the pale pink. It hasn’t bloomed much since we built our Tree House around it some 10 years ago, but it does have some flowers now. I prefer the Yellow Poui though. Their leaves shed, and one morning you awaken to this amazing cloud of canary yellow. They last only a few days, then form this yellow carpet on the ground, which is just as beautiful. I enjoy all this from a near distance because so many of my neighbours have the Yellow Poui in their gardens, and many more of these trees dot the hills around us.